Midmountain Majesty at Telluride’s Chic Madeline Hotel

Telluride is Hollywood’s idea of a Western ski town. Thanks to a late 19th-century silver boom, it is packed with ornate clapboard Victorian homes, most of them in a National Historic Landmark District. The backdrop of jagged mountain peaks is as dramatic as anything this side of the Swiss Alps, while the ski mountain has legendary steeps and bump runs–The Plunge looks like a giant overturned egg carton on a nosebleed-inducing incline–that rival those at Jackson Hole.